


Eliotrope's Portal

by sakurayu



Series: The Silk Pint [2]
Category: Wakfu
Genre: (Mostly) Mute Character, Gen, Not Beta Read, Sign Language, Wakfu Game
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 12:41:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24849940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakurayu/pseuds/sakurayu
Summary: An entry in The Silk Pint, a series of fics involving the members of the eponymous guild.When he realized his own transience, he started keeping a journal to document his existence. When he realized the ephemerality of his people, it became a log of every evanescent life added to his own. Perhaps, in that way, someone could finally answer the question of, "Who are the Eliotropes?"(World lore will be game compliant, but may not always be show-compliant/compliant with other works in the series.)
Series: The Silk Pint [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1785952
Comments: 3
Kudos: 1





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Not all souls remember their time in Incarnam, though they may be formative in one way or another.

Existence _hurt._

That was the first thought that ever crossed his mind as he winced, raising a brand-new hand with new fingers to shield his eyes from the light of Incarnam. A twinge in his chest told him to suck in air, the light told him he needed to blink- and for a second he just took it all in. Two hands, two feet, a face, clothes- all normal. A thrum of energy just beneath his skin, the pulse of life that he instinctively knew to be _wakfu_. Two- he felt a twitch and reached a hand up to one of the large ears on his hood. Those were there too. He was whole, but incomplete, somehow. _What was he missing_?

“Hey, stranger! Was that burst of wakfu just now you?” It nearly made him leap out of his skin to hear a voice, and he turned his head to meet whoever it was who happened to be speaking to him. An oddly dressed man with blue hair waved at him from afar, and it took him a second to register he may have meant him. He rose a finger to point toward himself anyway, just to be sure.

“Yeah, you! You must be a new incarnate! Welcome to Incarnam!” The voice repeated, just as pleasant as before. He still eyed the new person wearily as the man scaled the carved-stone stairs leading up to the little platform he’d awoken on, not sure of his intentions until the man reached his hand out for a hand shake.

“I’m Otomai. What’s your name, young incarnate?” He froze, hand hovering at a distance from Otomai’s, eyes locking on to the man’s. That was it; that was what he was missing. He floundered for a second, hovering a bit too long for Otomai’s taste, and the man’s expression softened. “You must be _new_ , yeah? Do you have a name yet?” Otomai took the wide-eyed, terrified look to mean he most definitely did not, and chuckled.

“Right. That’s okay, we’ll just have to name you.” Otomai rose his hands in a placating gesture to encourage the child to relax, the low-pitched angle of the incarnate’s ears slowly rising back to their neutral position. “Shouldn’t be too hard… except I guess it _is_ with _new_ -new incarnates.” Otomai rose a hand to his chin, humming, which prompted the incarnate to shift under his gaze. “How about… Kairo? That should work, right?” The newly-dubbed incarnate’s ears perked up and he nodded, expression lighting up.

“Well, then, Kairo, you’re at a weird age to be incarnating on your own, so let me show you the ropes.” Otomai had a touch of free time before he had to run back to his lab and check on his current experiment, so it couldn’t hurt, right?

* * *

Three hours later and Otomai was still explaining the history of the World of Twelve (something was _missing_ , Kairo thought, but he couldn’t place exactly what). Kairo had begun to lag behind, droning out the alchemist in favor of taking in the world around him. Soft grass, trees with shimmering, pale blue leaves; he had a feeling it was much more beautiful than the world below, and he wanted to see it before he had to leave for some trivial reason like _actually existing_. He wanted to explore, dammit, and after three hours of listening to (ignoring) the alchemist drone on about Osamodas finding a dead rock in space and all the other gods coming to populate it too, he was ready for something else.

It ultimately wasn’t hard to slip from Otomai’s presence, and once he got far enough away that he wouldn’t immediately be spotted, Kairo began exploring. He collected leaves, slipped off his oversized shoes to run in the grass, picked up a few rocks with crisp blue and purple crystals embedded in them. The purple crystals gave him a sense of unease, but that was all the more reason to keep them.

The feather, however, was where trouble came in.

It’s white body held a violet shimmer that was somewhere between mesmerizing and unsettling to look at, so Kairo decided he’d have to collect it. Then the next one, and the third leading to a bush. In all his newly-spawned naivete he wasn’t prepared for the creature who shed the feathers to leap out at him, squawking and pecking, and he wasn’t prepared for the effect of flailing and stumbling back. A bolt of blue-hot energy shot toward the stasified tofu, causing it to squawk and flit away as quickly as it had appeared. Kairo slowly picked himself up from the ground, favoring his bruised tailbone for a moment before he examined his hands.

_Wakfu_. The word came unbidden to his mind, but he knew that must have been it. It was the same energy that he knew deep down pulsed in his veins, and apparently it rose for him to use when he needed it. The very thought made him giddy to try it out further, so he bounced on the balls of his feet and repeated the movement he’d done with his hands.

It didn’t work.

His brows knit together and he repeated the action, shifting his fingers this time. They lit up with blue energy and traced a glowing path in the air, but in his excitement he pulled his hand away and the energy quickly began to dissipate. He frowned and huffed, gritting his teeth and trying again. This time, he adamantly refused to move his hand from the path he started, and was rewarded with a swirling plane of blue energy. Spurred by his success, he repeated the motion, and to his surprise he was able to push it a generous distance with a slight nudge.

He didn’t know what to do from here, so he waved his hand around the plane- _portal_ \- and shoved it through. For only half a second he felt a weightless void and his hand popped out of the center of the other portal, and in his excitement from seeing the new thing he threw himself entirely through it. Kairo tumbled out the other side into a roll, coming to a stop with a laugh. He etched another portal into the air- the distant one winking out in the process- and leaped through, coming through with much more control than the first time.

Throwing a portal and leaping through it felt natural; an intuitive part of him that helped to further complete the picture of who he was supposed to be. His name was Kairo and he liked finding new things and could manipulate wakfu. He still felt an absence, a void where something belonged, but he’d fill that in with time. And when that time came, he'd accept it with open arms.


	2. Incarnation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The World of Twelve is a lot less forgiving than Incarnam, if the chestnut tree was any indication.

Kairo’s memory was fuzzy and his entire body _ached_. All he could remember was a whole lot of portals and a whole lot more gravity, and then greeting a tree. With his face. And then seemingly every other part of his body. The excess wakfu from his incarnation was already fading away when he came to, but he didn’t quite feel up to moving his limbs just yet. So much as a finger twitch made everything ache, after all, and the moon was rising in the sky. Just enough that he thought he could drift off to sleep right there, if it weren’t for the sudden light in his face.

“Dammit, son, couldn’t you have chosen _anywhere_ else to fall?” Kairo cracked an eye open to see the upside-down figure of a person holding a lantern. It took a few minutes for the woman’s face to come into view: light teal hair, loose braid, shovel over her shoulder. Kairo’s gaze dropped (raised? Was he upside down?) to her boots as she shifted the grip on her shovel. “And the chestnuts weren’t even _ready_ yet.”

Oh. That must have been the things poking uncomfortably into his back. He opened his mouth to say something, then hesitated and closed it. There was an odd metallic taste in his mouth and he couldn’t exactly pinpoint where it was coming from.

“Come on, now. Up.” The handle of the shovel was poking him, now, just a bit too harshly, and he finally shifted to roll himself over to get on his feet. Everything ached just a bit more than it should have, but he didn’t exactly know how to fix it beyond _not moving_. And _not moving_ wasn’t exactly an option to him, because he felt arms reach under his armpits and haul him to his feet. He wavered a bit, but the woman’s face was now in his.

“You’ve got a right bit of... _blood_ there. Open up.” She tapped his jaw, and at a loss of anything else to do, he opened his mouth. She whistled, and he realized at that moment that the weird taste was _blood_ and part of the ache came from a few missing spots near the front of his jaw. “Took it right in the mouth! Nice. Lucky for you they’re all baby teeth still.” Kairo snapped his jaw shut in response, wincing at the pain.

“Right, then. Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.” The woman said, patting him on the shoulder. Kairo was struck by how quickly the woman seemed to calm down and stumbled after her as she turned on her heel to walk away, but couldn’t bring himself to open his mouth and say anything. He didn’t know how he knew, but words could hurt.

The woman led him to a quaint farmhouse where a gobball lazed or the porch. Kairo reached a hand out to try and touch it’s wool- _it looked soft_ \- but the woman warned, “Careful now, he’ll chew that wrist warmer off.” It gave Kairo long enough pause for the woman to set her shovel next to the door and push it open.

“Paul, we got another one!” Another blue-haired person (a man, Kairo noted, with darker hair) stuck his head out from a doorway, eyes immediately locking on to Kairo. Kairo wasn’t sure whether he should stand his ground or look sheepish, but the man sighed and disappeared back through the door.

“Go get ‘im cleaned up and I’ll get another bowl. Reckon that’s the third time this month.” Kairo rose an eyebrow to that, shifting his gaze back to the woman. For her part, she just prodded Kairo along to a small bathroom and made him sit down on the edge of the tub. She started digging a few things out from a cupboard and setting them aside, striking up a conversation while she got her supplies together. “So, what’s your name, kid?”

Kairo tensed, leaning forward and gripping his knees. He opened his mouth to try and say something- it’s just a name, after all- but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. The woman turned back to him with a moist rag in one hand, a roll of bandages in the other. “Not gonna answer, eh? Come on now, incarnate. We need something to call you.” Kairo was ready to let her just start calling him something random, but he finally cracked as she started wiping the blood off his face.

“…Kairo.” The sound of his own voice spooked him; small and barely there, though that was likely because he hadn’t used it and hadn’t _wanted_ to use it. The woman paused in wiping his face off, giving him an odd look.

“Well, Kairo, you should be glad the chestnut tree broke your fall.” She muttered, wiping up more blood into the quickly-darkening towel. “Could’ve been a lot worse than losing a few baby teeth. Ain’t seen an incarnate with all baby teeth at your age before, then again I ain’t seen many incarnates young as you either.” Kairo just let her talk, poking around the newly voided spaces in his mouth. The twinges of pain were slowly receding in favor of a dull throb, but he at least knew now that they’d grow back, probably.

“You’re going to have a tough time with your age.” The woman continued, dabbing up the last of the blue smudged across his face. “Not to mention your…” She leaned back and tilted her head, trying to examine him. “…I ain’t quite sure what you are. Are those your ears?” The peaks on his hood drooped in response and he wasn’t sure if mentally referring to them as “ears” was accurate anymore. They _weren’t_ , because he could feel them and they most definitely were not ears.

“…I’ll take that as a yes. It hurt anywhere else?” Kairo pouted and shook his head despite the rampant aches and pains shooting through his limbs, crossing his arms. The woman chuckled in response. “Fine. Come on now, let’s get a hot meal in you. It’ll do you good to get a night’s rest.”

It was, in fact, not fun to eat hot stew with freshly knocked-out teeth.

It also felt like something was missing, but Kairo was eternally haunted by the inability to figure out what. He couldn’t tell if it was a particular seasoning or if he was supposed to be doing something he’d forgotten about, but the thought clawed at the back of his mind all night until he was staring out the guest room window at the stars. They made him… sad, somehow.

Homesick.

He didn’t know where the thought came from, but it rested in his mind long enough that he had to paw the welling tears in his eyes. This was the only place he’d ever been, yet it felt like he was far from wherever “home” was; as though he’d lost something he’d never seen. Whatever it was called, he would never know, and it took him a long time to fall asleep that night.

* * *

“Kairo, get that one over there!” Kairo jumped for the opportunity and dropped into a portal, reappearing seconds later just off to the side of the escaping gobball. It bleated and turned, steering itself back into the herd so it could be sheared for the last time of the season.

Kairo hadn’t had anywhere to go, so the pair of feca (Lottie and Paul, Kairo had noted) offered him a room to stay, and three days later he was helping them round up their livestock. He was pretty good at it, and they appreciated the help of an extra set of hands even _if_ said hands were still clumsy with the work.

“That weird magic of yours really is something.” Lottie noted as Kairo popped out of a portal next to her. He gave her a modest smile and glanced back toward Paul, who was quickly shearing the next gobball. A mountain of wool had already grown around him, dwarfing the moderately-sized feca. “The gobballs are all rounded up and it ain’t even noon yet. Why don’t you go take a break and pick up some of those chestnuts?” Kairo’s ears pricked and he nodded, disappearing through a portal. Something in the air lurched and the orchard basket- which was also beginning to amass a collection of gobball wool- disappeared as well. Kairo hadn’t done much in that first day besides lay around and sleep, but Lottie had noted every other incarnate that dropped in did that so neither she nor Paul had bothered him.

But on the second day, he had been all over the property, throwing around that unusual magic like it was nothing. It was almost entertaining to watch.

As it was, she eyed him from across the property as he went about picking up fallen chestnuts, adding them to the basket. After a while he turned and kicked the tree a few times to get a few more loose ones to fall down, a handful of them dropping and hitting him on the head for his efforts. The next time she caught him kicking the tree a portal opened up above him and dropped the falling nuts into his basket.

“Y’know, Lottie, we can’t keep ‘im. Kid’s probably gonna get tired of Tainela in a few days.” Paul piped up from behind a particularly large gobball, the sound of shears accompanying his voice. “They always do.”

Lottie sighed. “I know. But he’s _*young_ *, Paul. Younger than any of the other incarnates we’ve had come through here.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope the members of my roleplay group are happy. This is my first actual foray into fanfic writing.


End file.
